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First, she is Natalia Alianovna Romonova. She is a small child that lives a simple life in Russia with her doting father and sweet mother. They don’t have much, but they love each other dearly, and she revels in the simple pleasures that they can enjoy. The small family always seems to be able to scrape up enough money to take her to the ballet every year for her birthday. She adores sitting down the audience, staring up with wide-eyed wonder at the dancers on the stage above her, marveling at the grace and finesse of their fluid movements. She watches the impossible leaps and the dizzying spins and she thinks to herself, I want to do that someday.
She never gets the chance.
Her home is burned and she is stolen from the wreckage, screaming her six-year-old lungs out for her mother and father and writhing and struggling under the strange man’s grip. She is taken to the place—the Academy, they call it—that will become both her home and her prison.
At the Red Room Academy, her old name and her old life are stripped away from her, leaving her bare. Here, they still call her Natalia, but it holds none of the same meaning as it once did. What once stood for love and endearment is now no more that mockery.
Before she can be remade into what they want her to be she must first be broken. She struggles to hold on to some remnants of who she is as they tear her down and toy with her mind, as they teach her what it is like to be unmade. False memories are implanted in her mind and she knows nothing of who she used to be; when she wakes all she knows is that the man at her bedside is a friend and the place she is in is safe. She now believes that the combat lessons and undercover training and abuse is normal—there’s no longer anything wrong with it in her mind.
They don’t just change her mind, though—one of these men somehow got his hands on a variant of the Super Soldier Serum and thinks it a marvelous idea to test it on a small child. It works, and she is stronger and faster than she has any right to be. She’s told that one of the possible side-effects is a slowed aging process. She doesn’t like to think about that part.
She is sent on her first mission when she is eight years old. A picture and an address are all she’s given; she returns to the Red Room three hours later with blood-soaked hands and a tear-streaked face. She is consoled comfortingly, lovingly, even, and she feels better soon. That was the worst thing about that place, she thinks years later: they were kind to her and she trusted them when they said the people she was sent to kill were evil.
It’s during an evaluation that it happens. She is placed alone in a room with ten men each twice her size or more and told to fight. They surround her and it’s no problem at all; the first three drop within thirty seconds. But then one of them gets a lucky shot in through her guard and her legs are swept out from under her. Her head hits the concrete floor with a solid crack.
Then: Cognitive recalibration and she remembers.
Remembers all the horrible things they did to her in the beginning, remembers the old life that she once had, remembers every single lie in the past thirteen years.
She tears out of the facility, killing anyone foolish enough to cross her path, and never looks back.
From then on the only name she knows is Black Widow. She chooses this because just like the spider, she is small and seemingly innocuous until you give her reason to strike, then you die faster than anyone can comprehend. She makes a name for herself doing what she has been taught to do best, and the red in her ledger grows. Drakov’s daughter dies because her father got on the Russian mob’s bad side. They were very specific in their instruction that the girl’s death be as slow and painful as possible. In Sao Paulo she crosses paths with someone she never thought she’d see again—another of the girls from the Red Room—and they nearly destroy the city with their violence, but the Widow comes out on top. The hospital burns simply because it is in the way.
Then nearly thirty years later (she still doesn’t look a day over twenty-three) she slips up. She leaves evidence. Someone is following her and she knows it; they’re not very good but she’s cautious all the same. She lays low for months, posing as a common beggar on the streets of Paris until she thinks it might be safe. She takes another assignment then she finds herself being followed by an organization she’d heard of but never interacted with before. SHIELD.
Then she meets the strange man with the bow who claims he was sent to kill her. He chases her halfway across Europe before cornering her in an alley somewhere in south Berlin. She’s exhausted, injured and out of ammo, and he’s got a full quiver with an arrow nocked and ready to loose. He’s been standing there for a solid thirty seconds without moving and she’s getting antsy; she’s too far away to make a move on him but still too close to run without getting hit.
She says to him, “Do it already.”
He cocks his head to the side like curious dog, regarding her silently, and then asks, “Why do you do it?”
She knows exactly what he means and has nothing to lose from honesty. “It’s all I know.”
He lowers the bow slightly, the arrowhead now pointing more towards her toes than her eye socket. “Wanna learn something new?”
He offers her a choice: die where she stands or come with him and join SHIELD, leave her old life behind her and try to do something good for the world. She goes with the latter.
He calls base, speaks to a man named Coulson and pickup arrives. She’s restrained but she and the man with the bow—Hawkeye, he tells her to call him—both know that nothing would hold her if she really wanted to escape. They travel to a base in east London deep underground and she’s put through vigorous tests. She passes and is made a probationary agent, codename Black Widow.
They ask her to fill out forms with her real name, birthdate and important medical information. When she reaches the name blank, she makes one up.
Natasha Romanoff—so similar to her true name, yet so different at the same time—soon becomes one of SHIELD’s most valuable assets. There is mistrust, at first, naturally; everyone in the organization has heard tales of the Black Widow and what she does best. On her first dozen or so missions she is always partnered with Clint Barton, the man that gave her this second chance. At first, their pairing was purely out of spite from the organization’s director: “You brought her in, Barton, and if shit hits the fan it’s on you, got it?” “Yes, sir!” But it turns out that they work together fantastically; they make the perfect team. She proves herself worthy of the trust of the people around her, and eventually the sideways glances and whispering when she walks down the hallway at headquarters stop.
The Black Widow and Hawkeye become SHIELD’s top team, taking all the big missions. They are almost never separated. Budapest happens, and they vow never to tell another soul what really transpired in the fair city. Only Coulson, their official “handler” and something like an older brother to the two of them knows what really occurred.
Then superheroes happen.
She goes to Malibu and works for Tony Stark, and he solves the riddle of his heart, as her boss so eloquently put it. The hero saves the day and stands in the spotlight while she works quietly in the shadows, just as she’s always done. When she next sees her partner they swap stories of their most recent missions; Clint tells a tale of a crazed man that pummels the majority of the agents in the outpost and then turns out to be a god. There’s not much she can say to that.
For a time, things are normal at SHIELD, well—as normal as they ever get. Then the man that calls himself a god appears in swirls of blue light and her Clint is compromised. The helicarrier is attacked by its best marksman and nearly falls out of the sky, but she gets him back. That’s all that matters for a solid three minutes until Fury says that Coulson is dead.
Then a black hole opens up in the skies above Manhattan and her world is blown apart as she fights these creatures from another planet to save her own. She gets a boost from Captain America (Captain America!) and she rides an alien to the top of Stark Tower to try to close the portal that’s letting there hellish creatures in. Iron Man flies a nuke into outer space and she waits until the last possible second—she’s no Hawkeye but she sees him falling back out just in time—and she does it, and then it’s over. Thor hauls Loki back to Asgard, and then Thor comes back with news that his kid brother will not bother them again.
Then, somehow, they become a team.
Now she can add a new title to her list. She’s an Avenger. She does good in this world, real things that help real people, and she’s so grateful for it. She doesn’t have to do her work sneaking through the shadows or lying about who she is. She can show her face. For the first time in a long time, she feels safe in her surroundings, comfortable with the people around her.
For the first time since she was a child, she has a family.
Thor, with his loudness and childlike wonder at the world around him that so contradicts his ferocity on the battle field.
Steve, their clichéd strong and courageous leader who is still somehow so innocent even after all he has been through.
Bruce, who she was so afraid of in the beginning (on the helicarrier wasn’t the first time she’d seen the Hulk) but she comes to trust him all the same; she learns to see past what she fears to the man beneath.
Tony, like the annoying, coffee-addicted, snarky, genius little brother she never wanted but has come to begrudgingly tolerate anyway.
And her Clint, the man that believed in her with absolutely no reason to all those years ago, who has stayed by her side and been everything she needs him to be. She thinks she might love him, but she doesn’t know how to say it.
They gather for team bonding night every Thursday evening (“Nay, friends, you say it wrong! ‘Tis Thorsday!”) and she can’t help but think about her past while she sits here reveling in her present. She has known many names in her unnaturally long life. Each calls to mind a diverse set of experiences, a whole different way she sees the world. And sitting here, surrounded by these people, these five individuals that somehow care for her despite all the wrong she’s done and is still trying to make up for, well—
She can’t help but think that she likes this one best.